[ale] Old Silicon, New Distros

[brian at polibyte.com]

Quoting John Mills <johnmills at speakeasy.net>:

> Thanks for the note. I could certainly install by network, but I still
> need an appropriate boot diskette. What might you suggest?

For debian there are several floppy images. [1]

floppy/boot.img                 -- boot floppy for network, CD installs
floppy/cd-drivers.img           -- CD drivers, including all IDE,
PCMCIA and SCSI drivers
floppy/net-drivers-1.img        -- network drivers, including PCMCIA
and wireless
floppy/net-drivers-2.img        -- extra network drivers, including PCMCIA
floppy/root.img                 -- second floppy for network or CD installs

You can use them to either began an installation where packages are
installed from a cd or an internet mirror.

Alternately, if you have another system to serve the installation
media [2] via tftp you can network boot. Instructions are in the  
installation guide [3]. If you NIC doesn't support PXE,
Alexander Heinz provides a floppy that has worked well for me. [4]

[1]
http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/dists/etch/main/installer-i386/current/images/floppy/
[2]
http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/dists/etch/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/
[3] http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch04s06.html.en
[4] http://etherboot.anadex.de/

-Brian